


begin again

by elliebell (Naladot)



Category: Day6 (Band), Wonder Girls
Genre: Awkward Crush, Awkward Dates, Crushes, Cute, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Humor, JYP Nation Ensemble, Loneliness, Male-Female Friendship, Teasing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-04-23 07:21:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19146232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/elliebell
Summary: Some crushes get buried, pushed to the side, never acknowledged, certainly never confessed.And sometimes a crush comes back again.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Look, this is the most self-indulgent fluffy thing I’ve written in a long time. I know, you know, now we all know, and here it is to read. OK.
> 
> Not meant to represent reality in any way, shape, or form; it’s just fiction.

* * *

 

“Weddings, huh?”

 

As opening lines go, this is not Jae’s best. It’s really not even mediocre, more like sub-standard, but he smiles resolutely anyway, because he’s gotta stick this reception out for an hour more at least and he’s going to have to spend that time playing Solitaire on his phone in the corner if he doesn’t strike up a conversation with someone who isn’t drunk, dancing, or flirting. All of his band members and managers are thus occupied and he’s low on the popularity list within JYPE circles outside of his band, and Jimin keeps hanging around Jaebum (who, like the rest of the Got7 members, tends to give Jae the cold shoulder, particularly on the dance floor), which leaves Lim.

 

Note: Lim is currently sitting at a corner table herself, and from what he spotted as he walked over, playing Solitaire on her phone, so he’s not totally confident this conversation is going to go, even if his opening line didn’t suck.

 

Lim blinks up at him, like it takes her a moment to register his presence. Maybe she’s drunk—but, ah, no, she fakes a smile. “Yeah,” she says. “Weddings.”

 

She gestures at a chair for him to sit down and clicks off her phone while Jae settles in, turned to face the dance floor. “You weren’t up for dan—” he squints at the dance floor. “Is Brian twerking?”

 

She lifts her eyebrows in what he thinks is amusement. He watches long enough to confirm that Brian is, in fact, twerking, and looks away when Bambam joins him. That image is going to scar him for life.

 

“This wedding will look really great in photos,” Lim says casually. When he looks over, she doesn’t look too happy about it.

 

“Not every day a ‘beloved friend’ gets married,” Jae says with a wink, then internally cringes, because dear Lord he did _not_ go into this intending to wink at her. Even he is vulnerable to the trappings of the idol lifestyle, including a dangerous winking habit.

 

She looks at him for a long moment, as if contemplating whether or not to mention the wink, and then just laughs. “Yes, my ‘beloved friend’ who voted to disband my group.”

 

“He was in that meeting?” Jae nods toward the groom, one of the company’s higher-ups, currently toasting other higher-ups.

 

“From what I’ve heard.”

 

“But you still came to the wedding.”

 

“Still have a contract.” She smiles, not unkindly, and smooths out an imaginary crease between her eyebrows, as if to press away a headache.

 

He keeps quiet, sensing there’s a lot more to this than what she’s saying, and he’s curious but unwilling to press. Dowoon is now dancing in the middle of a circle while Twice cheers him on, and his bright red flush is visible all the way across the room.

 

“I thought I’d be married by now.”

 

Jae looks back at Lim. She’d spoken without tone or emotion, and her face is almost expressionless save for the way she’s glaring down the floral centerpiece in front of her.

 

“Me too, actually,” Jae says.

 

“Really?” She asks, looking over at him with genuine curiosity.

 

He rubs his palm against the back of his neck. He’s never really shared this with anyone besides his closest friends, and saying it to her feels a little too vulnerable. He’s supposed to be manly, so like—stoic, or something—but, whatever. He might as well tell her the truth. “Yeah, I mean. I dunno. I always figured it would have happened by now, but—”

 

“You decided to do this.”

 

“Yep.” He grins at her. Now he’s feeling a little sad. One of his best friends from childhood, two years older than him, just had a kid. His cousin just had her second. His ex-girlfriend from college just got engaged. And sure, he’d pick this job every time, but occasionally when he thinks it would be nice to meet someone he remembers that he’d be running the risk of ruining his band’s careers, and second-guesses himself. The result is that he’s alone. Go figure.

 

She considers him for a long moment, and then looks away. “I feel pathetic sometimes,” she says softly. “But here I am hanging out with all these college kids and they come to me for advice and I’m just—what am I supposed to say? Sure, I’ve dated, but walking around in the middle of the night looking over your shoulder for cameras doesn’t really count. That’s not the kind of dating they want advice about.”

 

Jae thinks about asking who she’d dated and decides against it. If she kept it out of the company gossip mill, there must have been a reason—and besides, she looks so miserable, that he figures it wouldn’t do any good.

 

He stands up and holds out a hand. “Come on. Let’s go dance.”

 

If he’d tried to do this a year or two earlier, he definitely would have blown it. But his crush on Lim has waned to a comfortable twinge in his chest, and all he really wants right now is to get her mind off things.

 

She looks up at him, a small smile twisting her lips. “You want me to, what, dance my feelings away?”

 

“Endorphins,” he says with a shrug, and grins. “Come on.”

 

She sighs, and then smiles. A real smile. “No twerking?”

 

“I would never subject you to that image. Just don’t look at anyone else.”

 

She looks up at him and he smiles wider. Then she reaches out and takes his hand. “Okay.”

 

They dance until the bride and groom drive away, and Jae doesn’t mention that they’re still holding hands long after they should have let go. But no one is paying them any attention. When she finally slips her hand out of his, he tells himself he doesn’t notice.

  
  
  
  


She’s on her way home when her phone lights up, drawing her attention away from the taxi driver’s rambling rant about rising housing costs, and down to the screen. _I think you missed out,_ it reads. _Sorry you had to spend the party with me instead of… whatever the hell this is??_

 

She opens the screen and a video pops up. It’s a full ten seconds of Bang Chan, Jihyo, Sungjin, and Jaebum balancing tiny plastic cups on their foreheads while their group members try to build the stack higher. Sungjin’s falls immediately, and then Jaebum’s falls when he starts laughing at Sungjin’s, and then someone knocks over Bang Chan’s, leaving Jihyo victorious. Lim smiles, and writes, _Yeah, you really took me away from the good stuff ;)_ She looks at the winky face for a few long seconds before she backspaces and deletes it, then sticks a laughing emoji in its place. The taxi driver hasn’t stopped talking the whole time.

 

A few seconds later the video pops up on her Instagram feed, instantly gaining thousands of likes. She thumbs back through her own photos, but the few she’d taken all include Jae. This gives her pause—she doesn’t need management’s approval for her own posts, but Jae might, but it also seems awkward to send back a message like _not to make this a big deal but can I post this photo on my instagram?_ They’re labelmates, though, so it’s not like anyone is going to assume they’re dating by virtue of a single photo. She weighs her options and finally says _fuck it_ (in her mind, not out loud, she isn’t that wild) and chooses one of her and Jimin and Jae sitting at a reception table with cake, and another of herself posing with some wedding flowers, and finally a short video of Jae dancing, because who says the popular kids get to have all the fun? She captions it _wedding fun with JYP friends~_ because the best way to stave off rumors is to labelmate-zone him, and hits post.

 

Within seconds Jae texts her _wow, ain’t no party like a Jaehyung party_ and then a few seconds later _i guess you don’t mind having me on your instagram?_

 

She smiles to herself, and writes, _I had fun :)_

 

He sends back a blushing emoji, and then she doesn’t reply, because this isn’t a thing. She’s had plenty of crushes that wound up going nowhere, and this isn’t going to be one of them. She knows better than that, these days.

 

She slides her phone back into her purse and watches the lights of Seoul slip past her window.

  
  
  
  


Jae doesn’t really like to let his bandmates in on anything to do with his dating life. They tend to either make fun of him, or give advice, or do both at the same time, and he’s interested in none of the above. It’s not like he’s without dating experience, after all, but they make him sound like he’s some kind of loser (and he’s not, he’s just not interested in mundane relationships that go nowhere—it’s right there in his MBTI type description, and they all sat through the same training as him, so they should know).

 

Still, he’s not very good at understanding girls, so around one in the morning he goes padding through the apartment, looking to see who’s home and awake. Brian’s door is open but the room is dark, so Jae can expect incomprehensible drunk texts sometime around 3 AM. He makes a mental note to put Brian on mute. Sungjin looks to be home and asleep, Wonpil’s light is on, and—well, he’s not exactly going to ask Dowoon for dating advice, is he? So what if he’s got the most dating experience out of all of them? It’s _Dowoon_.

 

So he knocks on Wonpil’s door. The music seeping through the door stops abruptly, followed by a “what?” Jae opens the door.

 

“Hey,” he says, closing the door behind him, in case Dowoon comes snooping around. (It’s not that he has a problem with _Dowoon_ , just FYI, but more that there’s something super unpleasant about having Dowoon tell you “what women like” with an air of derisive superiority in his tone.) “I need your advice.”

 

Wonpil looks very skeptical about this. “Okay.”

 

“So,” Jae says, flopping onto the end of Wonpil’s bed and pulling out his phone, “Is this flirting?”

 

Wonpil reads over the conversation for a moment. “Yes,” he says, and hands the phone back.

 

“Are you sure?”

 

“I meant, _you_ are flirting.”

 

“How is that helpful?” Jae narrows his eyes at Wonpil, befuddled by this absolute uselessness. “What about her?”

 

“Oh.” Wonpil shrugs. “Yeah. I dunno.”

 

“You don’t know?” Jae rolls his eyes and stands up. “Kay. Thanks a lot.”

 

“Jae,” Wonpil says, in a level tone that stops Jae in his tracks, like a dog perking up its ears for praise. “Literally everyone knows you like her.”

 

 _Not_ what he was wanting. “What? Who said that?”

 

“Everyone?” Wonpil gives him a look. “You know? After the Instagram posts? The ‘92-liner only lunch table’ at the company concert?”

 

“That was because _you_ kept giving me wet willies while Jinyoung filmed it!”

 

“Right.” Wonpil smiles happily, thinking back on his own joke. “It’s kind of convenient though that you two were the only two 92-liners...”

 

“No one thought that!”

 

“Did _you_ think that?”

 

“Shut up.” Jae pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay, so I like her, but the point is it’s never been reciprocal and that’s _fine_ as long as I don’t make an ass out of myself.”

 

“You do that every day, though.”

 

“You’re not helpful!” Jae turns to storm out of Wonpil’s room.

 

“Just ask her out!” Wonpil calls as Jae exits the room. “It will be so much less annoying for the rest of us!”

 

Jae slams the door behind him, except Sungjin is sleeping, so he closes the door really fast and then stops it just before it hits the door jamb and closes it softly instead. As it clicks closed, Dowoon’s head pops out of his room.

 

“Who are you asking out?” Dowoon whispers.

 

Jae groans (without sound) and returns to his own room.

  
  
  
  


Lim is honestly more than a little surprised to see a text message from Jae pop up on her phone the next morning.

 

_ > Question for you _

_ > Do you wanna help me record a humorous English music video? _

 

 

She stares at her phone, trying to discern what this even means. She’s not doing anything today, anyway, and the prospect of hanging out with Jae again doesn’t seem so bad. After all, she woke up to tons of comments which read “you guys are cute” in a variety of different phrasings, and _maybe_ it gave her head a little skip-beat every time she read it. Maybe.

 

Before she can ask for clarification, another message pops up.

 

_ > Please say yes, I have a vision and I need someone to rap. Brian said no because he’s a LOSER... whaddaya say?? _

 

  
  
  
  


Rewind to ten minutes earlier.

 

Jae busts open the door to Brian’s room and says, “Do-you-wanna-do-a-music-thing-with-me-today-NO-ok-great-bye!” And then rushes out of the room again. It’s only as he’s flopping back onto his own bed that he realizes Brian is probably hung over—which would explain the death glare he received when he started talking, actually—but it’s too late to do anything about it.

 

He sends the first two messages (with much revision for the most precise of word choice) before Brian walks in, his hair sticking up in all directions. “Are you making up fake ways to hang out with Hyerim-nuna?”

 

“ _No,_ ” Jae scoffs.

 

“That’s what Wonpil said.”

 

“Wonpil’s an idiot.”

 

“No I’m not!” calls Wonpil from down the hall.

 

“Why don’t you just tell her she’s your first choice?” Brian asks.

 

“Because then she’ll _know._ ”

 

“That you made up a YouTube project as an excuse to hang out with her?”

 

“When did I do that? I asked you for help first, and you said no.”

 

“Actually—”

 

“Shush. You’re hungover and you obviously didn’t want to join.”

 

“I’m only a little hungover.” Brian rolls his eyes and leans against the door jamb. “If you asked her out on a real date, she’d probably say yes.”

 

Jae sighs and drops his phone onto his chest. “No one is asking anyone out! I’m hanging out with my _friend_ , who I can be _friends_ with, oh my god.”

 

“You mean, your friend who you’re only not asking out because of your crippling fear of rejection?”

 

Jae glares at him. “First of all, you’re my least favorite. Second of all, get out.”

 

Brian laughs as he backs out of the room. “Tell her I say hi!”

 

Jae returns to the text he was typing before he was so rudely interrupted and changes “ _Brian said no because he doesn’t feel well”_ to ‘ _because he’s a LOSER”_ and hits send.

 

As soon as he’s sent it, Dowoon slides into his room in his rolling desk chair. “Who are you asking out, hyung?”

 

“No one.”

 

“Sliding into someone’s DMs is a delicate process,” Dowoon begins.

 

Jae gets up, shoves Dowoon out the door so he goes careening down the hall, and slams his door.

  
  
  


 

Lim looks out the window of her apartment and sips at her coffee.

 

A while back—before the disbandment—she’d sought out Jae to befriend him, her only same-aged colleague besides Sunmi in the company. Her bandmates had their own worlds, their own circles of friends, and as much as she loved them—as far as she’d come in owning her place in the band since 2010—she still felt sometimes like she didn’t really belong. She didn’t have the same easy rapport with the guys in 2PM and 2AM that they had, and no one looked up to her with stars in their eyes from the new groups, either, which made the long hours spent preparing for company concerts a little lonelier than she really liked. She wanted a friend.

 

Of course, what she didn’t really want was the teasing looks her bandmates threw her every time they saw her talking to Jae in the halls of the company building.

 

“How old are you guys?” she’d asked them once the door to the practice room closed. “Seriously?”

 

“He’s weird in a cute way,” Sunmi laughed. “You’re cute in a weird way. You match!”

 

Lim… didn’t really know what to do with that, but Yeeun was already talking before she could ask any questions.

 

“The last guy you dated was, who? That jerk you met at Inkigayo?”

 

“You just didn’t like him because he was too informal,” Lim protested.

 

“ _No_ , I didn’t like him because he he kept chatting Sohee up every time you left the room,” Yeeun said with a sniff. Yubin tilted an eyebrow in Lim’s direction, as if to say, _you can’t argue with that_.

 

“He’s not the last guy I dated, anyway.” Lim reached for her guitar and sat down in a huff, plucking at the strings without following any real tune. “And why can’t I just have a friend?”

 

“You can have a friend,” Yubin said, her lips twisting into a teasing smile. “But you keep flirting with this one.”

 

“Am not.”

 

“A little bit,” Sunmi said with a fake grimace, her eyes going wide with her delight.

 

“He’s like,” Lim stopped plucking at the guitar and flailed a little bit, searching for the right word, in _any_ language. “I don’t know. Goofy? Not exactly what I have in mind.”

 

“Yesterday you said, ‘I have the worst taste in men. I’m always attracted to jerks. Stop me next time.’” Sunmi pointed her whole bass guitar in Lim’s direction as she said this.

 

“We were both drunk! How do you even remember this?”

 

“The _point is_ ,” Yeeun interrupted, “We just want you to be happy. If you don’t like him, we won’t tease you about it.”

 

“At least in front of you,” Yubin said, looking at Lim with a smirk.

 

Lim considered her options. She thought Jae was cute and _really_ nice, but the last thing she needed was people teasing her about JYP Entertainment’s oddest idol recruit, especially when she’d finally realized that there was no hope in dating a fellow idol.

 

“I don’t want to date him,” she announced.

 

And just like that, her band stopped teasing her, and she closed the door on even considering the possibility.

 

Now, though. A lot of years have passed. She isn’t even doing that job anymore. And Jae is different than she remembers—more grown up, now, but still very kind.

 

She bites at her lip, finishes the last of her coffee, and then picks up her phone. _I’m game. Where should I meet you?_

  
  
  


 

Jae leaps into action as soon as his phone goes off. “Shit,” he says aloud, reading her question. “I never thought that far ahead.”

 

Dowoon scoots back into his room, grinning. “See? You should have taken my advice.”

 

 

 

 

 _tbc_...


	2. Chapter 2

About twenty minutes after her last text, Lim finally receives an answer to her question in the form of a single street address. When she searches it, it turns out to belong to a coffee shop not too far from where she lives—meaning Jae is going to have to commute about an hour to reach her. She’s about to text back to tell him she can meet him halfway instead when he sends  _ on my way _ and she’s left staring at her phone, wondering when Jae became the kind of friend who went out of his way to meet up with her. Then again, Jae is more than a little odd. Maybe he just wanted to get out of the city proper.

 

She interrogates herself as she chooses an outfit. “What are you doing?” she mutters aloud, holding up a pink cotton dress by the hanger. She tosses it aside and keeps digging. “Don’t be stupid.”

 

She holds up another dress, deep blue and short, and then hangs it back up and opts for a white shirt and jeans instead. The result is decently attractive, insofar as she cares to look attractive. The voices in the back of her head automatically sizing up her flaws speak softly, these days. She pushes the thoughts away and nods at herself. She looks good.

 

If anyone knew she was spending this much time on her appearance to meet up with  _ Jae _ , well, that would get her teased right out of even going. But then again, no one is here to make fun of her, and her new friends all think Jae is sweet and follow him on Twitter, and after the last video they did Sunye texted her asking  _ is he the trainee you liked? ;) _ Lim had read it, tried to think of a response, and then just never replied.

 

The thing was that—at least when Lim was actively going into the company and doing concerts still—Jae ranked pretty low on the popularity list within JYPE. Her own group members liked him, but the most common label other people used among the other idols to describe him was “weird.” When Jae was dating some girl a couple years back—an exceptionally pretty girl with some moderate success on the indie circuit—more than one person joked she was only in the relationship because she wanted to date an idol to get her foot in the door. Even then, Lim thought that was a pretty cruel thing to say.

 

And Lim hates herself for it, but maybe she distanced herself from him just because she didn’t want to hear those same jokes made about herself.

 

She rakes her hands back through her hair and pulls on the ends, curling her lips into an unattractive grimace until she laughs at herself. If Jae knew how much she’d cared about her own popularity, he definitely wouldn’t like her.

  
  
  
  


 

Jae’s brain crashes when he spots Lim walking into the coffee shop. It’s like he’s in a movie, a bad movie, staring at her and gulping while he waits for his brain to reboot. Shit, is he a  _ stereotype _ ? He refuses to say any form of  _ “Wow, you look… wow” _ because he definitely saw a whole YouTube compilation of that one time and he’s not living in a low-budget romcom, so help him, he’s at least got to be living a romcom with snappy dialogue.

 

“So,” she says without preamble, sinking smoothly into the chair across from him. “What’s your ‘vision?’”

 

Jae’s thoughts rev back to full capacity. “Have you seen Flight of the Conchords?”

 

She hasn’t, so he takes a solid fifteen minutes to show her clips—at first she laughs politely, but by the end she’s laughing for real, and he’s just marveling at the lyrical genius.

 

“Right, so, I want to do this sort of song,” he explains, “but about, like, living in Korea with shitty Korean skills.”

 

“You don’t have shitty Korean skills,” she says, giving him a look. Her smile is frozen in confusion.

 

“Ask literally anyone,” Jae says, smiling back at her. “But yeah like, shitty Korean and being an idol. I wanna go real meta here.”

 

She hesitates, splaying her hands over the table and then picking up her tea and then finally looking back up at him. “Jae, are you—sure we’re the right people for this?”

 

“Yes,” he says automatically, envisioning the YouTube hits in his mind’s eye.

 

“Because, I’m just saying, I think  _ you _ can do it, but I’m not sure that I’m the, um, best talent for—sarcasm?” She squints back at him and gives a little shrug. “People tend to read me as, like—”

 

Her eyes drop down to her tea. 

 

“As what?” Jae prompts.

 

“I think the reference was always ‘Kidz Bop’? As in, I rap like I’m in Kidz Bop… I don’t come across as cool…” She gives another little shrug and a very determined smile.

 

Jae is once again rendered speechless, this time for an entirely different reason. As a rule, he tends to avoid too much Kpop commentary, so as to avoid becoming a crazy person. One trip down the Reddit hole was enough for him. (Okay—one trip, like, a month. He’s got some restraint.) He loves the internet, but it is a cruel and weird place not intended for Kpop idols.

 

“What the hell is wrong with Kidz Bop?” He blurts.

 

“It’s—childish?” She shakes her head, her lips pursed in a confused smile. “People want, like, 2NE1 I guess—”

 

“There’s nothing wrong with your rapping or your voice.” He’s feeling indignant now. The back of his neck flushes. “And when you were writing your own stuff your voice was  _ perfect _ —it’s all about suiting the song to your voice—I mean, your verse is hands-down the best part of ‘Candle.’”

 

“Really.” She seems to be laughing at him.

 

It occurs to him that he can’t even remember the names of his own songs half the time, but he’s referencing a Wonder Girls album like he’s memorized the track listing. In his defense, it was a really good album. He keeps talking.

 

“Yes? We all think so. Me, my band, everyone.” He counts off on his fingers as he goes. “So that’s conclusive.”

 

“I didn’t know you were such a big fan.”

 

“I inherited your guitar!” He flails a little. “We’re  _ connected _ .”

 

As soon as he’s said it he wonders if this is too much, too soon. They’ve never been especially close friends and he’s skirting dangerously close to a cheesy confession scene in a drama. If he kissed her and she just stood there with her eyes open, motionless, that would  _ suck _ . 

 

_ Rein it in, Jae, _ he says to himself.

 

“I do miss songwriting, actually,” she says. “I’m pretty rusty, though.”

 

“With your talent? We’re guaranteed a YouTube success!” 

 

This is decidedly not reining anything in. For some reason he thinks of Dowoon saying  _ girls like someone cool, hyung, _ while he was brushing his teeth that morning.  _ No offense but you’re not exactly cool? I mean I think you’re cool but you’re not COOL ya know? _

 

“I’ll try my best,” she laughs. She doesn’t look put off at all, which is—surprising. Did he really not screw up yet?

  
  
  
  


 

They relocate to a nearby park to begin writing the song. Jae’s already got a skeleton of a multilingual song worked out; Lim eyes some lyrics scratched out on the back of a receipt and she doesn’t know Spanish but she’s still pretty sure they don’t make sense. She smiles to herself and takes out a notepad from her purse, ready to accomplish this task.

 

Jae stops strumming his guitar and looks at her. “You might be right, actually,” he says.

 

“About what?” She has no idea what he’s talking about, but something in his expression changes, like he’s uncertain.

 

“This probably won’t be as funny as I want it to be.”

 

He starts to set the guitar aside and, without thinking, she reaches out and grabs his wrist. They’d held hands at the wedding reception but she hadn’t thought too much of it—wondered what he thought of it, of course, but figured they both could use the simple affirmation of holding someone’s hand. 

 

This time, though, she’s highly aware of the warmth of his skin and how close they’re sitting, close enough that he could kiss her if he wanted to.

 

For a second, she thinks he’s going to. He looks at her like he’s going to.

 

But then he doesn’t. She clears her throat. “Jae, it will be funny.”

 

“Or it’ll be lame.”

 

“Who cares?” She moves forward and takes the guitar out of his hands. It’s been awhile since she held a guitar, but she still remembers how to play simple chords, and she starts strumming. Her smile grows. “People like you, Jae. They’ll like this.”

 

After a moment, he smiles back at her, the hint of a blush across his cheeks. “You’re just angling for more screen time, aren’t you?”

 

“I’m nobody’s ten-second feature,” she returns. He laughs at that, leaning back into the grass and looking up at her like—actually, she’s not sure anyone has ever looked at her like that.

 

It gives her heart an uncomfortable skip-beat, but she doesn’t look away until she’s sure she’s not imagining this.

  
  
  
  


 

Jae has no illusions about where he fits into the social structure of Kpop. The answer: he doesn’t. Seems to be a recurring theme in his life.

 

Part of his problem, he knows, is that he has a lot of trouble hiding his insecurities. Everyone has them—well, except Brian—but other people fake confidence a whole lot better than he ever has. No matter what he does, the cracks show, and like the herd animals he used to watch on Animal Planet, he gets abandoned as too weak to run with the pack. Herd. Whatever.

 

Jimin used to get really philosophical about it, back in his ASC days. _ “It’s your fear of not fitting in that keeps you from fitting in!” _ she’d said after an awkward filming session with Got7, hitting her hand like she was giving a speech.  _ “You just need to—” _

 

_ “Believe in myself?” _

 

_ “Fake it till you make it!” _

 

Jae’s seen a whole lot of fake in this industry. He’s not too keen on playing pretend, so he’s had to make peace with the fact that his job has about the same social expectations as his high school: the prettier and richer and cooler you are, the more people will like you. Everyone else better find their own little niche. And honestly, he’s pretty cool with it all now, but sometimes the fear comes back. He can ignore haters just fine, but he’s never dealt well with being excluded.

 

He looks at Lim, watching her pluck at his guitar, her lips pursed in concentration.

 

“What was it like when you first joined the Wonder Girls?” he asks. He’s never asked this before.

 

She stops playing and looks up, surprised. “Um—” she says. “Weird.”

 

“Weird how?”

 

She laughs and gives a little shrug that he’s coming to see as a defense mechanism, a familiar  _ I don’t care _ conveyed through the action. “Have you ever met Sohee?” she asks.

 

“No.” He saw her at a restaurant once, in the distance, but he’s pretty sure that doesn’t count.

 

“Well, she really didn’t like me. Thought I was dead weight. I mean, she and Sunmi are best friends, so I sort of got where she was coming from—but she has a lot of pull in the company, you know? People just sort of subconsciously agree with her, which didn’t help me fit in. Yeeun-unnie always does exactly what she wants, Yubin-unnie just kind of goes along with whatever, and Sunye-unnie had a lot of bad things happent that year so she wasn’t—really present.” She stops and looks at him, the slightest crease in her brow revealing a deeply hidden pain. “And the thing is, Sohee was right. I really wasn’t good enough.”

 

“That’s—”

 

“True.” Lim speaks with such finality that he can’t argue, even though he wants to. “I trained for dancing—did you know that? I was supposed to debut with Miss A.”

 

“And then you’re stuck in one of the top girl groups.”

 

“Exactly.” She chews briefly at her nail, then stops herself. “I never knew what to say or when to say it. They were all so good at handling the media and being charismatic and I had to learn it like I was learning math, or another language, or something. Rote memorization and practice.”

 

Jae doesn’t know what to say. She’s never spoken quite so openly with him, and he doesn’t want to say the wrong thing, but he also wants her to see what he sees.

 

“You’re really strong,” he says.

 

She laughs. “Maybe that’s it. I don’t know. Once I admitted to myself that I was never going to make it as an idol, I felt a lot freer.”

 

And she does look freer. He can tell that much just by how she carries herself, and the easy way she laughs. It's a good look on her.

 

“It kind of sucks that you’re not writing songs, though,” he says.

 

“Well—” Her eyes go wide and she snaps her fingers. “I’ve got it. Oh my god.”

 

“What?”

 

“The title for the song. ‘The Inkigayo Sandwich  _ Rap _ .’” She grins at him. “Get it? It’s a pun.”

 

Jae laughs out loud. “You’re a genius.”

 

He takes the guitar back when she offers it, his heart swelling with admiration.

  
  
  
  


 

By the end of the day, Lim reaches a solid conclusion: if she’d hung out with Jae more during her idol days, she would have had a lot more fun.

 

He’s easy to be around in a way she rarely experienced in the idol world. She doesn’t have to second-guess everything she says or wonder if it’s going to be repeated to someone else later, twisted into a different meaning than she intended. Her younger self might have had a long checklist of ideals for her potential boyfriends to match, but she’s older now, and her ideal type doesn’t look like it used to. Whatever checklist she’s got left, Jae ticks all the boxes.

 

Once she thinks this to herself, she sits with her pen and paper in hand, a little stunned.

 

“Are you okay?” Jae asks, looking confused.

 

“What?” She says. “I mean, yes. I’m okay.”

 

“Okay.”

 

She pulls herself back to the present moment and looks over her notes. They’ve got a whole song written down, now, with a spoken word bridge section that just reads “Dowoon and Wonpil say whatever they want.” She’s spent the whole afternoon laughing until tears spring to her eyes, so she thinks this song will be a success.

 

“Whoa, it’s already five?” Jae looks at his phone in shock. “Sorry. I had no idea it was that late.”

 

Lim bites at her lip and considers her options. She might be reading this all wrong, but—well, what the hell.

 

“Do you want to get dinner?” She asks, as nonchalantly as possible. “I mean, if it’s already five.”

 

“Sure!” He says so quickly that he must be starving. Lim realizes suddenly that they’d worked straight through lunch. Jae leaps up and then holds out a hand and pulls Lim to her feet.

 

They end up at a little restaurant a few blocks away and order more mandu than they could possibly eat in one sitting (“Don’t underestimate me,” Jae says) and as she takes the chopsticks out of the box on the table, she decides to prod a little at this situation.

 

“What happened with you and that girl you were dating?” She asks cooly, picking up a dumpling and only looking up after she’s popped it into her mouth.

 

A fan turns quickly over head, blowing Jae’s hair into his eyes with every turn. “I kind of dumped her.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“Turned out everyone was right,” he says with a small smile. “I think she just wanted to meet more people who might give her a record contract.”

 

“That’s shitty.”

 

“Yeah, well,” Jae says, pushing a hand through his hair only for the fan to blow it back, “My fault for dating her, right?”

 

“No, it’s just shitty. You deserve better.”

 

He looks at her for a long moment, like he’s trying to puzzle her out, and she feels suddenly nervous. Then he smiles.

 

“What about you?” He asks, reaching for the pitcher of tea on the table. “Got yourself a college boy toy?”

 

She snorts, watching as he pours tea into her cup. “Oh my god. Of course not.”

 

“Why not? Not into younger guys?” He grins and hands her her cup, then pours tea into his own, sneaking a teasing glance up at her.

 

She takes a sip from her cup and measures her tone of voice carefully. “I prefer guys my own age, actually.”

 

He looks up at her, and doesn’t notice the tea he’s pouring fill right up to the top and spill over the sides.

 

“ _ Jae _ —” she cries out, laughing. The tea spills everywhere, puddling around the plates.

 

“Crap.” He sets the pitcher down and calls over one of the employees, an ahjumma who comes over laughing with a towel.

 

“She’s very pretty,” the ahjumma says to him, “but watch what you’re doing.”

 

She walks away still laughing, and Jae flushes a bright shade of red.

  
  
  
  
  


After they finish dinner, they amble over to the nearest subway station. Jae is still not totally sure he didn’t screw up somewhere along the way today (besides the tea, but he's not thinking about the tea, and he's never telling Dowoon about the tea) but he’s got a song in his back pocket that’s almost guaranteed to be a YouTube hit, because it’s hilarious, and he’s pretty sure Lim is like.  _ Lingering _ .

 

“Well,” she says when the subway station sign is in sight. “This was a fun day.”

 

He speaks his next words without meaning to. “Next week,” he begins, and then stutters, and shuts up.

 

Lim looks up at him. "Next week?" she prompts.

 

Well—now or never. He rubs at the back of his neck. "Next week, do you want to go on, um. You know. A real date?"

 

She looks stunned for a second, and he wants to sink right through the sidewalk and down to the subway which will whisk him away from his embarrassment.

 

But then she says, "I'd like that."

  
  
  
  


 

_ Three months later _

 

“It’s up!”

 

Lim looks up as Jae catapults himself into the chair next to her, holding up his phone with a manic grin on his face. The others at the table give them an odd look, but quickly turn back to the stage, where singers from all the JYP groups are currently performing a song as a wedding gift to the newest happy couple. Jae, on the other hand, isn’t paying attention to the performance at all, instead surreptitiously sticking an earbud in Lim’s ear and hitting play.

 

It’s their joke music video, which she’s of course seen before, but not the final, edited version. She has to bite her lip to keep from laughing and disturbing the wedding—and, honestly, if so many staff people are going to get married in a short time frame, you’d think they’d at least try to vary up the wedding entertainment, but no—and when the video ends, she and Jae can’t look at each other, lest they start laughing. Her lungs burn and her eyes water and her lips keep twitching at the corners, but she manages to keep silent and stand up and clap with everyone else at the right time.

 

Finally, the MC dismisses them to eat and she and Jae both burst out laughing.

 

“What is  _ wrong _ with you two?” asks Jackson, swiveling around on Lim’s other side to look at them. This just makes Jae laugh harder, while Lim tries to wipe the tears off her face without messing up her makeup.

 

“Don’t worry about it,” Lim says, with a wave of her hand. 

 

She falls back into her chair. This is a very different wedding than the last one she attended. Not the program, which is almost identical—seriously, did they hire the same wedding planner?—but her mood. She feels light and happy as Jae sits down next to her.

 

Dowoon appears on Jae’s other side, giving her a little wave. “Hello, nuna,” he says, ducking his head down. To Jae, he says, in English, “It’s cool!” and she has no idea whether he’s referring to the video or something else, because he gives a weird grin and then disappears into the crowd. Jae stares at the empty chair, looking defeated and annoyed, and then sighs. A few tables away, several members of Twice are looking at them. They all look away when Lim waves in their direction.

 

Jae puts his arm on the back of her chair and leans over to whisper, “So can we ditch this before everyone gets drunk?”

 

“I thought you said you wanted to blackmail Wonpil?”

 

“This is a good point,” Jae muses, scanning the room for Wonpil.

 

Lim can feel someone watching them, and she looks up to see Bambam on the opposite side of the table, squinting between them. “Are you guys, like,” he tilts his head, “dating, or something?”

 

She gives him a sly smile. “Looks that way, huh?”

 

Bambam looks confused, and he gets up and wanders off.

 

“And that is how everyone starts gossiping about us,” Jae says, his gaze returning to her. 

 

She pats his leg and smiles. “Let’s ditch.”

 

They sneak out the back hand in hand.

 

 

 

 

_ end. _


End file.
